'Sorry,' I said.
'Apology accepted,' said Lois. 'But just because I know you didn't take Kerrie's lousy stamps—'
'Yeah, it looks bad,' I said.
'Yes, it does,' Lois agreed.
That, of course, was exactly why Kerrie made sure that Lois was present as a witness. This enabled Kerrie to say, 'My stamps were missing... and I found them on Frank's desk. Go ahead, ask Lois—she was there.' And what could Lois say but, 'Yes, I was there. I saw Kerrie pick up a roll of stamps from Frank's desk.' Of course she could refuse to discuss the subject, but obviously that would only further incriminate me, suggesting not only that Lois witnessed the event but that she also considered it too sordid to speak of. Kerrie had thus crafted a set-up for which I had no possible defense in the Court of Rumor, even if nothing could be positively proved against me.
In contrast to the bold tactics of Kerrie were the effortless subversions of—
Harry
An affable enigma is the only way I can describe him. Always nattily attired, a politely attentive aura hovering somewhere about his person whenever one spoke to him, always willing to 'get right on' things anyone asked him to do, always willing to 'follow through' with things whenever anyone made a request of him... and never, ever, doing any of these things.
Consequently I was not entirely unnerved when Harry returned none of my phone messages (no one expected to speak to a living Harry when they dialed his extension). It was only when I took Harry's customary black-out on all transmissions coming from me and later added it to Richard's unusual and ominous inattention to my doings throughout the rest of that week, when normally he would have been looking over my shoulder at every opportunity, that I became concerned.
But when it came to matters involving Harry, there was not much of which I could really be sure. What a master in the making he was, even if the truest candidate for better things, faster things, but in no sense cheaper things was—
Barry
He was the most apparent of all the potential heirs to Richard's position when the day came that the one-time star quarterback (or record-breaking baseball pitcher or whatever), for one reason or another, departed from our division, our company, or the world entirely. Seemingly Barry was only passing through on a brief tour of duty as a departmental supervisor in the division. He came to us reputedly as a person who possessed highly evolved organizational skills, which he had demonstrated in a number of other hot-spots throughout the company. When he arrived in our midst he was already widely celebrated—both behind his wide back and to his plump, fast-talking face—for his big brain and his freakish talent for 'sizing things up', for bringing law and order to the company's most unruly frontiers and outposts.
My own sources informed me that the only reason that anyone with whom Barry worked endorsed his gifts so vigorously was to expedite his departure from their precincts, foisting him off on some unsuspecting department that could use some 'revving up' and benefit from the rare potency of his well-endowed frontal lobe. And thus arose the legend of Barry the Brain, Barry the Organizer, and, most unfortunately, Barry the Re-Organizer. Wherever he went in the wildernesses of the company he was given a free hand to revise the charts and maps, the processes and procedures that had always seemed to work so well... until he got his meaty hands on them. Because, in fact, as Barry moved with mighty strides from one position to another in the company, he left nothing but chaos, confusion, and conflict in the dust behind him.
In my own observation I could understand how he might be taken for a person of super-developed organizational skills, if only because he showed himself to be cruelly intolerant of the least lack of organization on the part of those around him, using his mile-a-minute mouth, his tireless zest for charts and graphs that no one else could comprehend (due to their over-determined complexity), and his utterly bogus reputation to call into question the qualifications of anyone who questioned his.
Yet there was a time when I actually empathized with this man, who obviously suffered from the same clinical disorder (obsessive-compulsive) with which I myself was plagued, although I struggled to hide my mania, which manifested itself in ways that could not help me in my career, rather than parading it for all to see. But the time for empathy had passed when I arrived at work earlier than usual on Wednesday of that week. I wasn't at all surprised that Barry was in the office at that early hour, although my inner alarm went off when I saw him marauding about the region of my cubicle, moving, as he always did, at a comically brisk pace for a man of his heftiness.
'Barry,' I said by way of greeting.
'Frank,' he returned, his voice dopplering into the distance.
Then, immediately upon entering my cubicle to begin my work that day, I jumped back as if a wild animal had leapt out at me. My own obsessiveness did not involve a fastidious sense of organization, but there was my work-space... and it was trim. I didn't think for a moment that the housekeeping staff of the building had gone on a rampage of tidiness where my cubicle was concerned. No others in the area betrayed such treatment, as I noted after a short and secretive investigation.
Okay, so I got the message: 'Barry was here,' it read as if spelled out in pushpins on my bulletin board. What of it? I thought—I had nothing to hide. Then my own variety of obsession took over, and I practically dove for the desk drawer which contained all the electronic and printed documentation of my proposal, my new-product idea, my special plan. I was on my hands and knees staring at the dark metal face of the drawer. I wanted to dust it for fingerprints, use a magnifying glass to examine it for the tiniest signs of forced entry, test with a micrometer if the lock had been tampered with by foreign hands. Of course, none of that would have alleviated my anxiety, and, in time, still on my hands and knees, I finally grasped the handle of the drawer and gave it a heart-stopping pull. It was still locked, for whatever that was worth. And that was worth nothing, because someone could have picked the lock on the drawer, taken its contents, and closed it back up again.
Pulling my wallet from my back pocket and fumbling around for the key, I then opened the drawer. Everything that had been inside before was still inside, yet I nonetheless wanted my print kit, magnifying glass, and micrometer to judge if anything had been disturbed. In addition to the documents locked away in that drawer was a folder of photographs of sites around the city, photographs which I had been taking for years. I had many more such folders at home, full of pictures of alleys and abandoned houses, boarded-up churches, a derelict library (with interior photos of fallen shelves and moldy books strewn across a gritty floor). Most precious to me was a series of photos I took of a place where there stood a crooked street-sign but no longer any street deserving of the name—just some rubble along a path and a few relics of unidentifiable structures on either side of that path.
To the naked eye everything in my desk drawer seemed in order, but it was still possible that Barry had opened the drawer some time before my arrival at work that morning, photocopied the printed version of my document, electronically copied the electronic version of my document, and replaced it with the painstaking precision that only another obsessive could achieve.
'What are you doing down there?' asked the voice of Barry the Detective, Barry the Spy.
I slammed the drawer closed, too afraid to realize that I was giving myself away.
'I was taking something out of my pocket and a quarter popped out. Rolled under my desk.' Something out of my pocket? That would not cut it with Barry. It had to be specific. But I did say a quarter, not just a coin. 'Did you want something from me?' I asked.
'Yes, I did,' replied Barry in a leisurely manner, uncharacteristically so. He then walked away, also in a leisurely manner.
Barry the Mover, Barry the Shaker.
Barry walked. And talked.
In a leisurely manner.
I opened the drawer again and checked its contents, touching the (lousy computer!) disk and rifling through the fiftysome pages of the printed document. Then
I locked the drawer. Then I opened the drawer and repeated this ritual as needed throughout the day. I should have taken the goods and gone back home that morning. That would have to wait, though, until the work-day's end. Because, as bad luck would have it, I needed to finish up some small project and pass it on to—
Sherry
I stayed as close to my cubicle as I could during that day. I managed to forego trips to the men's room and went without leaving the building for lunch at the Metro Diner, which was actually a daily pleasure—an escape rather—and not part of any ritualistic behavior. But at some point I needed to pass on this small, this eency-weency project to Sherry. The deadline was two o'clock.
I thought that perhaps I could get Sherry to pick up the work at my cubicle, rather than my having to transport it all the way across the floor to hers. However, she wasn't responding to my phone messages either, nor to the half-hourly messages I sent to her... machine.
When the time came to make the delivery I tried to do it as fast as possible, striding at the speed of Barry to Sherry's cubicle, which was near the door leading outside the company's office space and into the hallway, where one could still see the pre-Depression style of the building and enjoy cracked walls and moldings, the dusty globes of dim light that depended from lengthy, tarnished chains running down from the high ceiling, and the creaky railings and banisters that lined the stairwell soaring both upward and downward into the most suggestive shadows I had ever seen.
Arriving at Sherry's cubicle, however, I found that the hand-off was not going to work as smoothly as I hoped.
'Sherry,' I said.
'Could you wait a sec?' she replied, very much preoccupied with digging something out of her purse. I realized that it was more than she could handle, taking delivery of this nit-sized project and digging something out of her purse. She would have to finish the one before she could turn her mental resources to the other, that's all there was to it.
I declared earlier in this document that, 'with one exception,' there was no cuteness among The Seven. Sherry was the exception, although a serious qualification must be appended to this statement. Physically she was attractive, not to the point of being a harrowing beauty, but enough to put her over the line between women of average or even 'good' looks into the company of those who possessed across-the-room attraction. (If anyone believes that I'm perpetuating some arbitrary or twisted image of the world, that's fine with me—I wish them well in their transactions with social reality.) The qualification to which I made reference above is this: if you happened to cross that room on the other side of which stood Sherry, what you confronted was... I can't even name it—some kind of thing inhabiting the body of an attractive woman, an alien from some diseased planet or a creature of low evolutionary stature that by some curious means had insinuated itself into a human being at some stage in her development, the result being this Sherry-thing.
If she closed her eyes and didn't speak Sherry could indeed pass for an attractive human female. But the moment she spoke or the moment her thing-like eyes came into view, she became a Gorgon (no mythic significance intended or necessary). This duality that Sherry embodied could often be a source of tremendous conflict to those around her, who one moment would experience the tide-pull of her figure and the next moment, when she happened to speak or the image of her eyes loomed up, would be inwardly retching with disgust at the very existence of this Sherry-thing, as well as heaving away inside with self-revulsion for having felt an attraction to this creature. And at the moment I was standing at her desk, Sherry's eyes were turned away from me and I had already forgotten the sound of the few words she had spoken.
So I stood and watched as she dug around for something in her purse, and the deeper she dug the more she shifted about in her chair, causing her already short and close-fitting dress to rise higher and higher toward her buttocks. I was transfixed, turning to stone, until the door leading out into the hallway opened and someone entered the company's office space. This particular someone was Betty, one of the higher vice-presidents in the company. I saw that it was Betty because, having emerged from my fixated staring at Sherry, I now noticed that palmed within her right hand was a small mirror in which she was watching Betty watching me watching her. Sherry then giggled and turned around.
'Hi, Betty,' she said.
'Hello, Sherry,' Betty said.
But Betty had no hellos for Frank after she had seen me looking at Sherry in a way that I never wanted to be seen. Her face merely exhibited a look of disgust (at me!) before she continued on her way.
'Now, what've you got there, Frank?' said Sherry.
Without a word I dropped the folder containing the project on her desk and, for the first time that day, made a visit to the men's room.
5
It was now Friday, and there had been no communication between myself and Richard since Monday. As a formality I decided to check with someone in New Product to confirm whether or not Richard had delivered my truncated version of the two-page proposal that I had shown to The Seven on the first day of that week.
No surprise: New Product had no record of such a proposal with my name attached to it. No surprise: they were no longer even soliciting ideas for New Product and rarely, if ever, did.
No surprise: New Product was as much a mystery to me in its purpose and function as every other division in the company.
Surprise: a 'freeze' had been placed on all activities involving New Product until the upcoming 'restructuring' of the company had been set in motion and the company had 'relocated' its whole operation (more than likely to some nice new high-rise in the suburbs, thereby fleeing the luxuriant rot of the city in which it had resided for over two decades).
While the aforementioned changes within the company were news to me, and big news at that, none of it seemed to have the least force of reality behind it. This was more or less the case with all occasions of 'moment' within that particular working world, and perhaps all others: so often there would be the promise of either some cataclysm or some bright new age on the horizon; but whatever it was, however it might seem to the imagination, it would unfailingly come and go like a thunderstorm through which one had slept, leaving a few puddles and some small tree branches scattered upon the ground as the only evidence that anything at all had happened. Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed. And the days rolled by, and one grew older, and none of it seemed to possess the least import or substance. Finally, looking back from the deathbed of your entire life in the working world, you would be left exclaiming, 'What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)
Nevertheless, the information that had leaked out to me from New Product served as sufficient excuse to get together over lunch with a friend of mine within the company. (Yes, I did have a friend or two in that place which I have thus far painted so darkly.) I dialed his extension and actually reached a living person on the other end of the line.
'Hey, Frank,' I said. Not only did we share the same given name, but both of us had also labored 'forever,' as one of my staff put it, within our respective departments.
'Yeah, Frank.'
'Got any lunch plans?'
'Do I ever?'
Of course he didn't. Frank kept very much to himself as a rule. Somehow he had managed to remain on an even lower rung of the company ladder than I had over a comparably long... career, I suppose you would call it. That alone earned him my deep respect. He also knew quite a lot about t
he company and its personnel that normally would have meant nothing to me.
But that week had been anything but normal, and aside from what I had to tell Frank about the info I acquired from New Product that morning, there was something I wanted to ask him which served as my prime motivation for my requesting a lunchtime audience with my namesake.
I had been waiting outside a few minutes before Frank emerged from the revolving doors of the old building, put on his sunglasses, and lit up a cigarette.
'The usual place?' Frank asked.
'Unless there's somewhere else you'd prefer,' I said.
He just smiled, and we both started walking the mile or so to our destination, weaving through the regular cast of suits and street-people, Frank looking down at the sidewalk as he smoked one cigarette after another while I alternated my gaze between the street level—cheap clothes stores, cheap electronics stores, liquor-lotto-and-checks-cashed-here stores, wig shops, pawn shops, gun shops—and the Beaux-Arts skyline of the ever-receding past.
The Metro Diner was located just beyond the fringes of the central downtown area of the city. When we walked in I looked over toward the counter, behind which stood Lillian Hayes, the woman who owned and had operated the diner for the past thirty years or so. I caught her eye and smiled, and she gave a little wave my way. Then Frank and I settled into a booth toward the back.
'How's the Sloppy Burger these days?' Frank asked.
'Still sloppy. Still the best.'
'That's for me, then,' he announced as he stubbed out his cigarette in a crusted ashtray that had a little metal band arching over it with grooves in which lighted cigarettes could be secured. 'You don't see these things much any more,' Frank observed, examining the ashtray with the eye of the most sensitive lover of downtrodden artifacts. 'There's something about it, you know?'
'I know,' I said. 'There's a Japanese word for it—wabi.'
'Wa-BEE,' repeated Frank, who didn't require a verbal definition of the word to understand its meaning.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 103